Subject: Re: booting diskless
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@stat.Duke.EDU>
List: port-pmax
Date: 06/13/1996 10:41:18
Jonathan Stone writes:
 > 
 > If someone could give me a pointer to some recent (preferably,
 >  *the* most recent)  notes on how to set up a DECstation to boot
 > NetBSD diskless, I'd appreciate it.
 > 
 > Does anyone have anything on the Web about how to do this, and which
 > PROM revisions work and which don't?
 > 
 > thanks
 > --Jonathan

I've got some stuff up at:
ftp://ftp.isds.duke.edu/pub/Users/gallatin/NetBSD/pmax/diskless

Its *not* recent; its from back in early March, and its not in html.
I've been quite busy with other things, and haven't been keeping up
with the pmax port since then.  It looks like there's a flurry of
activity now; would you like me to put it in html?

As to which PROM versions work, and which don't -- all I've got is
empirical data.  2100 & 3100 boxes seem to always work.  On some
5000s, some diskless kernel's will fail to boot; this seems to be more
a matter of size than anything else.  I've found that if a kernel is
small enough, it'll boot just fine.  As to what that magic number is,
and if its a particular segment size, or the total size of the entire
file, I don't know.  I do know that if you strip out things like
KTRACE, COMPAT_ULTRIX, MFS, and NFS_SERVER, it'll work on any box I
have that will also work with in a diskfull configuration.

Cheers,

Drew